The centerpiece of The Third Annual Queer Arts Initiative Showcase in Greenville, South Carolina is impossible to ignore—a life-sized humanoid, their bald head jutting from a narrow wormlike body carried along by dozens of crawling fingers. Their face: rageful. Their fingernails: painted. Centipede 1 (2024), a sculpture by ceramicist Jackson Shaner, aesthetically anchors the collective exhibit exploring the challenges, isolation and feelings of otherness that queer artists experience in an often rigid, conforming society.
Artist, musician, and QAI Showcase curator Rae Clark had been analyzing the ways in which Pride is often presented—the rainbows, the joy and celebration. They wanted this year’s exhibition to reflect the complexities of being queer in this current cultural moment. “I had just been thinking about taking a different approach to Pride in general,” they said. “The political climate’s been scary. A lot of queer people are having a hard time. We have a lot of feelings as a community.” This year’s QAI Showcase holds all those feelings in balance—joy, humor, horror, and rage–alongside an unbeatable determination to thrive.
For Clark, building an exhibition often starts with an artist whose work has stuck with them, like a song in their head. This year’s curatorial catalyst was Jackson Shaner’s ceramic work. “His work just shows a lot of emotion—it’s a little bit on the horror side.”
A dreamlike, black-and-white photograph by Emi Austin ties into that same emotional thread. Adagio (2021) is a high-contrast portrait of an individual splitting smoothly into three. Their eyes are shining with hope or tears, or perhaps both. Their mouths are peaceful or withholding or perhaps both. There’s a silence to the image, though it speaks with clear confidence, elegantly laying out the emotional range and complexity of its subject. “As a queer photographer,” Austin shared, “I use surrealism to express the emotional intensity, fragmentation, and transformation [of] my inner world.”
When putting a show together, Clark leans toward the minimal. “I like to leave a lot of space to experience individual pieces and their relationship to each other.” Jacob Lehmann’s assemblages—found object narratives on the American South punctuated by pops of safety orange paint—benefit from that breathing room. “My work acts as a manifestation of the search and creation of space where I belong.” His piece Crisco Kid (2025) features a serene painting of a pine tree, its form silhouetted in a loose, cloudy aura. A royal blue house printed on plywood butts up against the scene, the whole thing edged in bright orange and balancing atop an astroturf-capped Crisco can. Pieces like this ground the exhibition, adding Lehmann’s reflections of what it’s like “being raised in southern Appalachia as a queer person.”
Looping against the back wall of the gallery, Rainn Jackson’s video animation (Questioning, 2023) features roughed-out avatars against a rudimentary digital grassy knoll. In it, non-binary cyborgs probe a human male with questions about his gender. ”How do you know you are male?” one cyborg asks with earnest curiosity. The animated piece poses these questions to the viewer, too, extending a close examination of gender identity to the entire exhibition.
If Lehmann’s assemblages recall material memory and Shaner’s sculpture confronts queer embodiment, Jackson’s animation lends language to shifting forms. Emi Austin’s photographs, meanwhile, catch the psyche mid-metamorphosis. Together, the artists and Rae Clark invite viewers into the charged space of becoming, illustrating how queerness can be, as their show statement reflects, “messy, powerful, painful, brilliant.”
For QAI founder Joe Hindman, this exhibition at downtown Greenville’s Good Art Co. is part of a larger mission. “It’s not just about Pride month,” he says. “It’s about creating sustainable opportunities for queer artists—year-round, right here in the South.”
The QAI exists to inform, support, and promote queer artists in Upstate South Carolina. They hold workshops, classes, and exhibits that platform both established and emerging talent in the community. Next, they’re venturing to expand their visibility of the program, raising funds for advertising and partnering with local schools like Furman University to provide internships. “It’s been three years,” says Hindman, “but we’ve barely scratched the surface.” The QAI continues to carve out space where queer art can be complex, uncompromising, and deeply felt—where there’s room for joy, rage, play, grief, and the uncanny in equal measure.
